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by iguy 2797 days ago
It doesn't seem surprising at all that we fail to understand abstract questions like this. The experts only learned to answer them correctly after millennia worth of mathematical development!

To study how accurately Bayesian some animals are, I think you need to find ways to pose them questions which are relevant to them, and read off their inferences from their behaviour. This is obviously harder to do, and you have to worry a great deal about the animal optimising for something that differs from your first guess (e.g. it doesn't want maximum food on a good day, it wants not to starve on a bad day). I don't have references to hand but I think that when we can do this, the results are quite good.